Brocade Virtual ADX Server Load Balancing Guide (Supporting ADX v03.1.00) - Manual (Page 339)

Brocade Virtual ADX Server Load Balancing Guide 323
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Chapter
7
SIP Server Load Balancing
SIP overview
The Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is a signaling protocol used by numerous IP communication
products to create session-oriented connections between two or more endpoints in an IP network.
SIP is emerging as the preferred technology for Voice over IP (VoIP) implementations.
Application-aware network switches play a vital role in increasing the uptime and availability of
IP-based services such as VoIP. Many customers rely on this technology to meet mission-critical
application requirements. Together with advanced SIP intelligence, Virtual ADX switches offer a
highly scalable, available, and secure load balancing infrastructure for SIP applications.
SIP is an application-layer protocol that can establish, modify, and terminate multimedia sessions,
such as Internet telephony. In this implementation, Virtual ADX SIP server load balancing balances
SIP requests and responses, based on a Call-ID.
SIP Server Load Balancing is based on a request-and-response transaction model that is similar to
HTTP. Each transaction consists of a request that invokes a particular method on the server, and at
least one response. The method is carried within the request message.
For more information, see SIP: Session Initiation Protocol - RFC 3261.